About Welcoming Falls Church

Welcoming Falls Church is building a community of neighbors. Our goals are hospitality toward immigrants and refugees and opportunity for us all. We believe that by engaging locally we will overcome divisions and reinforce some of our society's greatest strengths. Inspired by a national movement called Welcoming America, we are grassroots, apolitical, and public-private in character.

Falls Church's history bears testimony to the struggles of African-Americans to attain their rights and freedoms, from Jim Crow through the Civil Rights Movement to today. And Falls Church—especially greater Falls Church—is becoming more and more racially and ethnically diverse. Just as the United States is in the midst of a historical demographic transition, so, too, is Falls Church changing. The public schools of the City of Falls Church play host to families that speak a total of 42 languages in the home, and the national and cultural backgrounds represented in greater Falls Church—with its population of almost 90,000—are even more varied.

The residents of the City of Falls Church and its elected representatives are responding to the challenge and opportunity of this growing diversity. The first sentence of the City of Falls Church's "Falls Church 2040" strategic plan states that "Falls Church in 2040 will be a welcoming and inclusive community," and the City of Falls Church City Council has supported Welcoming Falls Church with resolutions proclaiming Welcoming Week in Falls Church in September 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Vision

Our vision is that we – by being intentional, relational, and local – can build a community of neighbors, at a time when we are threatened by division. We believe that hospitality toward immigrants and refugees will bring opportunity to us all. And we encourage the residents of Falls Church – many of whom have these same instincts – to become aware, take action and advocate together so that our and to weave our community’s social fabric.